The narrator and his friend, elin, are sitting in a tavern in the middle of the night. They've just been robbed by a group of soldiers, and elin wants to know why they're so awful. He wants to get out of the tavern before the owner of the house catches them. He's also looking for a joke in the book of jokes that's on the wall. The narrator wants to find out what's inside the book, but he can't find it. He wonders why the robber didn't wash his clothes when he ran off with the loot. He also wonders why he's always being chased by soldiers. He decides that if he lives through this, he'll join the survey corps, and he wants to kill all the soldiers in the city. He asks the narrator to put the wall between the tavern and the city so that he can imagine that the city is without the soldiers. . He thanks the narrator for being with him all these years, and says that neither of them would've survived if it weren't for the joke book. He says that if the book hadn't made them laugh, they wouldn't have made it through the war. He compares the book to a bear standing in the rain, and the narrator says that the bear just laughed itself to death. This joke book, he says, is humanity's weapon against the city's soldiers.